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Basic Trope: The Player Character is given short lived access to mid-to-late game levels of power near the start.

  • Straight:
    • Early on in Tales of Troperia: Bob's Journey, The Team of Bob, Alice, Emily, Charlie, and Dave are joined by the grizzled veteran Jason Bloodspiller, who is at level 27 while the heroes are at Level 1. He takes down everything in the game until he has to leave.
    • Early on, Jason, the overpowered party member has to go make some Heroic Sacrifice.
    • Jason, the most powerful character that is in a party pulls a Faceā€“Heel Turn and the party has to kill him.
    • The player starts with an end-game equipment. After a brief segment, the game cuts to actual first level with the player having no gear.
  • Exaggerated:
    • Jason has a sweeping attack, high stats, and a good helmet, armour, weapon, pair of gloves, and pair of boots equipped. After losing his gears, he wears a clown suit that decreases his defense into receiving double damage from all kinds of attack, making him the absolutely worst party member.
    • Jason's attack destroys everything on the field in one shot. However, after losing his weapon, for whatever reason, his only attack is to tickle someone.
  • Downplayed: Jason is level 5; still tougher than The Team, but not overwhelmingly tougher.
  • Justified:
    • Jason has years of experience because he's the Hero of Another Story and has to leave eventually.
    • Jason sustains a serious injury guiding the rest of the party, taking him out of the action for a while. By the time he recovers, the party has caught up to, or exceeded his strength.
    • Jason is only stronger than the rest of the party due to his armor, which gets destroyed in a difficult fight.
    • Jason is a mercenary, hired to help the party complete a contract. Once the jobs' complete, he leaves.
    • Jason got mistreated by Emperor Evulz, who replaced him with Clay the Violent, Scottish Lefty. After letting some steam off of some enemies, he goes on to start Walking the Earth.
  • Inverted:
    • Alex is a level 1 character adopted into a group of level 20s while he learns the ropes of the game. Then they start a new game with new characters and everyone is even.
    • Lethal Joke Character.
    • When fighting the Post-Final Boss, Bob has an 11th-Hour Superpower that multiplies all of his stats by some ridiculous amount, making him stronger than the rest of the party combined.
  • Subverted:
    • It turns out that Jason gets killed instantly by the Big Bad before he gets to attack.
    • Jason says he has to leave the party but the party convinces him to stay, thus the player continues to have a character that's tougher than the rest of them.
  • Double Subverted:
    • The player starts with an end-game equipment. There is a brief scene where the equipment is almost taken away but it's narrowly avoided so the player continues to have few more areas with end-game equipment. Then the actual first chapter starts with weak equipment.
    • Jason, is the strongest character at the start of the game, but gets instantly killed before he gets to attack, only to immediately come back stronger than ever. Then he leaves the party after the prologue.
    • Jason survives the Heroic Sacrifice helps out in the endgame. He might be an 11th-Hour Superpower or your party might have leveled up comparably.
    • Then Jason loses much of his gear, removing his advantage.
    • Jason eventually gets called to another mission and has to leave, even though he'd rather stay.
  • Parodied: Every single attack Jason has involves strapping a nuke to the enemy and blowing up the entire other half of the battlefield.
  • Zig Zagged: Jason only has good equipment. Unequip it and he's normal... oh wait, he's a werebear so he gets a bonus if you unequip his stuff but werebears only get the stat boost if you're facing squirrels... but guess what, the Big Bad is a squirrel.
  • Averted:
    • Strong characters don't leave or characters won't lose any equipment.
    • There is no strong character or equipment to begin with.
  • Enforced:
    • "We need to keep people from getting bored with the basic attacks, so let's give them a tough guy to keep them entertained until they get more interesting attacks."
    • The game is an adaptation of another work where the overpowered Jason joins the team. To avoid having him take over all the gameplay, they demote his role to just a few levels.
  • Lampshaded: "Lemme guess, you'll go ahead and clear the path while we stand around and do nothing."
  • Invoked:
    • "I guess I have to send you Level 1 inexperienced adventurers with wooden everythings on a quest to save the entire world. Might as well give you some help along the way. Bring my best knight with you. He's going to eventually have to come home though, so don't get comfortable hiding behind him."
    • Realizing that Bob is more powerful than everyone else combined, Alex arranges for Bob and the rest of the group to go their separate ways to avoid Bob taking over.
  • Exploited:
    • Knowing that this next mission will be more dangerous than any before, The Hero purposefully asks for help from a number of mysterious strangers in hopes of finding a diamond in the rough to give them an edge.
    • They bring Jason with them to fight a bonus boss, and get a powerful weapon several levels early.
  • Defied: Bob start with a late-game equipment. He knows that at the end of the tunnel there's an equipment-vaporizing ray. Bob then tries to avoid it.
  • Discussed: "Yeah, but there's no way Jason is going to stick around with us too long. We just can't hope to keep up."
  • Conversed: ???

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